Ultra Street Fighter IV

[sith]

So after counless hours I finally got to the coveted A rank with the big man! I got so close several times before blowing it so it was such a big relief!

This is what pressure does to you;

No idea what I was thinkning!

[Qazimod]

Oof. Congrats on the A!

[JLM]

Good stuff sith! I reckon it won't take half as long to do it again in ultra.

I do hope we have some sort of heggapalooza for the ultra release. My day 1 Poison will be a beast and I need to share it with you guys.

[sith]

Yeah, should be a lot easier in Ultra. I'm up for a day one session at Alistarr's for sure. I was challenged to a FT5 by SFO Domihy's Guile and beat him 5-3 this morning which makes me happy.

God, I can't wait for Ultra.

[andygt]

I'm glad it's not just me who struggles with Thomas Hawk - never saw it as the one sided matchup it's supposed to be.

So please tell me Mr Sith how to beat you for free with guile?!

[sith]

I'm glad it's not just me who struggles with Thomas Hawk - never saw it as the one sided matchup it's supposed to be.

So please tell me Mr Sith how to beat you for free with guile?!

I have one bit of advice. Don't get knocked down!

[Fitzcarraldo]

No idea what I was thinkning!

Haha, that's my housemate! Who apparently has started playing Dhalsim while I've been too busy playing with my Wii U.

[Camel]

Your housemate has excellent taste.

[sith]

Small world indeed. Mad props to anyone who persists with Sim though, easily the hardest character to use imo.

[joffocakes]

Are there videos of good players messing around with Edition Select from Socal Regionals? Were people able to try it?

[Curtis]

Find the Day 3 Finals archive. They played about 40 mins or so before Top 8 (so near the end of the day).

[andygt]

Thanks Sith, that advice if Jellumesque

[IgTerminals]

Anyone for fightings?

[ah]

I can do fightings.

[Tofu]

fight night repeat final from yesterday again is streaming

[sith]

Good games to Joffo and Alistarr!

Highlight was picking Adon by mistake and doing ok with him. I always forget how much Joffo focuses

[joffocakes]

Good games sirs, and to Mr Terminals too! I was really hoping Dan's cl.HK would swat T Hawk out of those Body Splashes. Maybe if I took a wee step forward first. Guh.

[Qazimod]

I was on for a bit earlier but didn't get much endless in; the few random lobbies I tried to join booted me and I couldn't be bothered with hosting. I did go back to the lab for a bit though, partly to mess around on trials (and fail miserably) and partly to relearn random Juri stuff. I forget how useful her close standing fierce is for knocking people off their feet, and how much stuff you can follow up with (light pinwheel, super combo, any Fuhajin projectiles...) From there I just tried various combinations of these sorts of things, in different orders. Best button.

[JLM]

Juri's standing fierce is a decent answer to Rufus doing double dive kick. Myself and Alistarr were in a lobby with a Juri player and he would press it after every blocked dive kick. If Rufus went for a second dive kick he would be beaten clean, and if he went for a grab instead and it wasn't perfectly timed she'd be airborne and beat that too. It worked for a game, with me doing running commentary on it and working out the theory fighter in my head. Then Alistarr started frame trapping and lame trapping after each dive kick on hit or block and perfected the poor guy. There are no foolproof answers to everything in this game guys. Except Cammy, obviously.

Seriously though, coaching is so powerful in this game. Backseatfighter is crucial, and it is the number one thing I think the Leeds scene needs to improve. Joffistarr, at Hypespotting we must be in each other's corner for every match. Just a simple thing like "this guy is mashing crouch tech" when you might not have seen it yourself can instantly turn the match in your favour. As a bonus, it's a good feeling to make a Mike Ross style read on a player with someone else around to acknowledge it. When myself an Alistarr used to play ranked Strekken doubles, that one match where I went "this guy is a crouch tech monster, watch me frame trap him" and then immediately did it was possibly the most smug I have ever felt.

[IgTerminals]

Sorry Quazimod. Didn't see your message until I Dashboarded.

[ah]

Seriously though, coaching is so powerful in this game. Backseatfighter is crucial, and it is the number one thing I think the Leeds scene needs to improve. Joffistarr, at Hypespotting we must be in each other's corner for every match.

I wanted to coach you during your first match but the room layout was such that I couldn't physically get there without climbing over a table or walking past a screen! I feel like they'd be better off putting all the tables against the walls and the screens facing out into the room, though maybe there's some reason they didn't do that.

I definitely could've used a coach while the below was happening, too (trigger warning: contains footage of a rllmuk street fighter player looking absolutely terrified):

[JLM]

You already know how to beat Domihy though, so that's OK. I knew if you didn't crack, hit your b'n'b and were willing to be disrespectful with messiah kicks you could beat him because double dive kick is free damage against him. He cannot stop crouch tech-ing and he doesn't like dive kicks, command grabs or anything else that throws Guile out of his comfort zone. I also don't think anyone who hasn't played you 1,000 times is going to be ready for your set ups and mix ups. I was getting hype and also dying from the stress of it all watching in the crowd. I hadn't seen you JWong your ultra in a while, but playing a tough opponent on stream is an entirely different environment. I think I was the only person in the room who had you down as the favourite to win, so maybe if I had been coaching I could have at least been a bit of a counter to all the non-believers!

I think more anti-air cr.mp is a big thing you need to start doing in high pressure match ups, so I guess I would have mentioned that on coaching too. You do it in casuals but very rarely in play to win sets, at least from what I've seen. Guile's jump is terrible so he should never get away with it against Rufus. Also using it to punish people for jumping back in the corner like Ricky and Justin do. The latter is hard to do though; punishing people for jumping back in the corner is something missing from almost everybody's game, even at the highest level.

It was horrible to see that big drop on the b'n'b combo happen when it would have won the whole set, but I thought the recovery and the block on that last flash kick was really impressive. Would have been easy to crack completely after that drop, so props for not doing so.

As for my own matches:

JLM (Rose) 1-2 Benners (Sagat)

Losing my composure and patience is still my biggest problem in tournament and this was the case again here. If I have a long, exhausting round or game then it is almost inevitable that I will do something stupid later on in the set because I use up all my concentration. In this instance, I won the very first round by time out. I played the match up near perfectly, controlling the ground game, anti-airing, using my resources wisely. Did everything properly, but could already feel the adrenaline kicking in and tempting me to go dumb. Second game was a close back and forth one as well. Benners found some good mid-range buttons, but Nympho gave me some useful coaching and I stayed in it. I also discovered some stuff about the match up that I didn't know and gave Benners some free damage. Too impatient on my wake up as well. Third game I was fine for two rounds, then in the third I had meter, ultra and a big life lead and then jumped in. Benners did EX DP into ultra and killed me. "Mostly played correctly but did a stupid jump" is pretty much how my losses happen with Rose. Still, Benners is one of the better players in Leeds so it wasn't too discouraging to have a very close set against him without using Chun.

JLM (Dudley) 2-0 MBA Waveskill (Cody/Abel)

The Dudley pick here was because I played this guy for ten or fifteen games at the last SFO casual session and completely mauled him with Dudders. Pretty comfortable win.

JLM (Rose) 0-2 Darth Guile (Guile)

So this could have gone better if I'd picked Chun, because when I've played this match up in ranked we tend to trade wins. With Rose though, I wasn't really competing. He surprised me by going all out rushdown, jumping over with cross up short over and over again and trying to tick me with upside down kicks. Nympho mentioned after the match that I should have been doing air to air jump fierce to get him to settle down, but my mindset was too locked in to trying to play a ground game so I just sat there and let him go nuts. Then I got frustrated and started going in too hard myself, which is definitely a losing strategy in this fight as Guile does more damage if it's a brawl. I also found that upside down kick beats EX spiral clean, which I will know for next time. Thankfully there is plenty of footage of Arturo vs Dieminion and Arturo vs Knuckledu out there, so I can definitely do some studying before I fight this match up again.

1 and 2 without using Chun isn't the worst result ever, but I was disappointed by the nature of the losses. Completely threw it away against Benners, and I don't think Darth Guile is especially great, so my failure to adapt against him and then totally cracking left me quite salty. Thankfully Alistarr's excellent run in the tournament and the array of strong players (OMH, Shinji, ProFluke, Whaigo, Fuzzy, InfernoKong) putting on a good show show meant that I didn't dwell on it for long. Also got loads of fun casuals in and generally had a very good time. There's a tournament in Leicester on Sunday that's quite tempting, as one more play-to-win road test for Rose before Hypespotting could be very useful indeed.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

Were you cosplaying as bearded ultradavid

[mayor_mike_haggar]

Also your play looked loads better there than when I last played you. Good man.

[wretcherd]

I was almost as excited watching that just then as I was watching Snake Eyes earlier.

Big lols (blols?) at the commentators calling you out for repeatedly doing target combo until it worked.

Oh and not enough post-round face action from the stream.

[ah]

Were you cosplaying as bearded ultradavid

JLM and I wore the same outfit at Heggwest. In response to this I have moved out into the country, grown a beard and started wearing boots everywhere I go.

I grow vegetables in my back garden and will wear the same flannel shirt every day for the rest of my/its life.

[imp]

I wanted to coach you during your first match but the room layout was such that I couldn't physically get there without climbing over a table or walking past a screen! I feel like they'd be better off putting all the tables against the walls and the screens facing out into the room, though maybe there's some reason they didn't do that.

I definitely could've used a coach while the below was happening, too (trigger warning: contains footage of a rllmuk street fighter player looking absolutely terrified):

Beautiful! Not only have you massively upped your game with the consistency of those beautiful one frame links, but you've also managed to challenge Hegg in follicular battle too!

[Qazimod]

Sorry Quazimod. Didn't see your message until I Dashboarded.

No worries; I just went off and did my lab work instead. I'll probably be around again soon.

[mayor_mike_haggar]

Can guile punish that target combo? Flash kick maybe?

[JLM]

It's -5, so yes. People never punish it because by the time you've thanked jebus that you managed to block it you've already missed your window/are being hit by the next dive kick.